Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday June 25, 2010 @06:22AM
from the backward-compatibility dept.

bbretterson writes "From an interview Bitmob conducted with Civilization 5 Lead Designer Jon Shafer: 'You can import Civ 4 maps into the world builder and convert them into Civ 5 maps, including all the units and cities and stuff on it — the conversion process will just do that for you automatically. We're hoping that the first week Civ 5 is out, people will use that function and port all of the Civ 4 stuff over to Civ 5, so everything will be out there already.'"

i did play civ 4. it seemed identical to civ 3 but with slightly better graphics. in fact the only reason i bought it was on the hope that the AI was better. i was disappointed.

You really missed out on Civ 4 then. It wasn't at all "Civ 3 with slightly better graphics." I mean, first off, the graphics were alot more than "slightly" better. Second, it introduced a slew of game mechanics, games inside of the game, customizations. To say that it built upon Civ 3 would be an understatement.

On the other hand, Civ 3 really was Civ 2 with slightly better graphics. The same cannot be said for Civ 4. Not at all. I played both Civ 2 and Civ 3 extensively, and I can't describe how m

Culture is an easy enough way to win, you just need to plan for it by using a cultural civ. Diplomacy is possible, but you're not going to get a Diplo victory unless you're willing to use military to get it. Which victory type are you thinking is an intimidation victory?

Civ 4 map plots are squares. Civ 5 are hexagons. I don't see an easy conversion process that won't produce real not-just-semantic map differences (e.g. how to convert diagonal waterways where in a 4x4, one diagonal is water and the other diagonal is land, and ships can travel through the water diagonal?)

Try looking at how the game Elemental, War of Magic [elementalgame.com] development is going, that might be more your cup of tea.

Its been developed with the Mod tools, and they are realeasing them with it, its currntly in a true Beta, you know the kind where one can post feedback, and sugest changes that are more then cosmetic or extreamly minor.

Yeah this was my first question too. Nothing in the article about it, but it hesitantly alludes to the fact that the only things confirmed to "carry over" will be cities and units. So this could very well be an approximation rather than a conversion. Cities roughly in the same place, land masses roughly the same size and shape, rivers running the same general course and touching the same cities etc.

Units will be interesting though. If you import a map with huge unit stacks they'll have to be spread out to conform to the new one-unit-per-hex requirement. Suddenly a stack of doom will become a huge traffic jam across your civilisation!

From a computational chemist point of view, who uses both square and hexagonal lattice all the time, it isn't that difficult/strange actually. Thanks to the fact that periodic boundaries are used, it will just be a 'simple' conversion. The main issue one might encounter though is the fact that you'll go from 8 neighbours to 6 neighbours (if I am not mistaken the diagonals are also counted as neighbours in Civ4..., otherwise it's 4 to 6).Plus I believe they actually wanted to limit the diagonal travelling, so it makes sense to prevent the diagonal 4x4, instead of encouraging it.No, I am not worried about the conversion of the lattice/map. What I am worried about is the fact that in Civ5 it won't be possible to have more than 1! army per tile. So what will happen to the other dozen armies that were on the converted tile?

Or prevent the "the" from it, allow multiple maps in the same game, and let me colonize Moon!

Seriously: Undersea cities, orbital habitats, space-based weaponry, Moon colonies... Call to Power tried some of this stuff, so why not expand the scope of the game to hypothethical future worlds? It would be a lot of fun being able to retreat to the moons of Jupiter and prepare to retake the Inner System while they are sabotaging your attempts to extract hydr

Could you have program an effective hex-based map (taxes, military, etc.) for the computers in 1991?

No, you're right. The very concept of using a hexagonal grid would have been far beyond the computing power of any such system. To even begin to display a hex map like this requires at least a 3.0 GHz, quad-core processor and a DX11 video card with a minimum of 512M DDR3.

Or, of course, you could have just played Sword of Aragon [mobygames.com], Battle Isle [mobygames.com], Conflict: Middle East [mobygames.com], or just about any other authentic computer wargame from that era. You could even have played Advanced Squad Leader back in 1985, which despite being a board game still has more lines of code in the rulebooks than most computer games.

Yup. Just about all of the Koei games, including the still-frakkin-awesome Bandit Kings of Ancient China [mobygames.com], used the same hex-based combat system. And that was in 1989, and they were released on the Amiga for extra awesome points.

You could even have played Advanced Squad Leader back in 1985, which despite being a board game still has more lines of code in the rulebooks than most computer games.

ASL was one of the most amazing simulations of all time. The improvements it made over the Squad Leader system were incredible. I'm pretty sure I can still find my maps and counters in my garage of one of the closets if I looked hard enough. That might be a project for the upcoming weekend.

Civ 5 will only have hexagons. Hexagons are superior because moving in a diagonal direction in a square grid is essentially cheating. It allows you to cover more distance by skipping a tile. If today's Civ was using a square system legitimately, you would only be able to move up, down, left, or right.

Skipping approximately.41 tile, to be precise. Meh, I don't get that argument: It's easy to incorporate this into thinking; on the other hand, hexes make for some weird movement controls if not using a mouse. I liked that I could sometimes play Civ with arrow keys.

Hard to know how resources are allocated to a city in the new Civ, but at very least we know that's going to change. Moving resources outside of the city limits may be an issue - but then again, it may not.

My guess is that a city will be able to control tiles up to two tiles away (the hexagon system makes this pretty easy to define) as opposed to the "fat cross" system of before. Based on that image, if you place a city dead center and imagine it's "fat cross" as it would have been

In Civ4 going from (0,0) to (1,1) was possible through a diagonal move. In your conversion, this becomes impossible. This can have real importance in the game. A diagonal waterway in Civ4 will appear as non practicable in Civ5.

Going from a 8 neighborhood to a 6 neighborhood bears implications that are interesting but make conversion non ideal in most cases. If what you want is a nice map of Italy that looks about the same in Civ5, this is fine. But in the random map you loved so much in Civ4, some straits will disappear, some part of the sea will become lakes and just don't count on roads to be correctly converted.

In Civ4 going from (0,0) to (1,1) was possible through a diagonal move. In your conversion, this becomes impossible. This can have real importance in the game. A diagonal waterway in Civ4 will appear as non practicable in Civ5.
Going from a 8 neighborhood to a 6 neighborhood bears implications that are interesting but make conversion non ideal in most cases. If what you want is a nice map of Italy that looks about the same in Civ5, this is fine. But in the random map you loved so much in Civ4, some straits will disappear, some part of the sea will become lakes and just don't count on roads to be correctly converted.

Yes, it'll doubtless need some tweaking and it won't be exactly the same. But versus not converting it at all, it would presumably be easier than starting from scratch again.

Sheeze, just because it's not perfect, doesn't mean it's worthless. If you really want to play the old maps, stick to Civ IV.

If I were doing it, I'd "render" the terrain, then re-divide it into the new hexes , and infer the new tiles by the contents of the new grid, including cities, rivers, bonuses, etc. I don't know whether that would work cleanly, but it gets rid of that problem, at least; what used to be in 1,1 is still geographically close to 0,0, even if cell contents get moved, merged, or divided. Further, if a waterway runs between diagonal squares, it's likely that the corresponding hexes will also be contiguous.

The only problem I see with that, is that squares that were diagonal from each other in the original conversion no longer touch each other in the hexagon shape. Follow two diagonal squares on that diagram from start to finish and you'll see what I mean.
I'm leaning more towards the approximation idea (which I guess that diagram illustrates).

A hex grid can be thought of as a square grid with every second line shifted by 0.5 * squareWidth on the X axis, so the conversion can be rather straightforward. But yes, it will produce semantic map differences as some squares that were previously diagonally adjacent to each other no longer will be after conversion.

There's a very simple way to convert a map from squares to hexes. Just shift every alternating row down half a unit. This is known as offset squares [wikipedia.org] and it's homomorphic to a hexagonal tiling.

It would mean a very slight difference in the shape of things, but overall it would maintain the same gameplay. The only difference from the original, square-based map is that the rows that stay the same would lose their two bottom diagonal connections, and the rows that shift down would lose their two upper diagonal c

Well, I'd like to be able to run Civ5 on my netbook. Civ4 isn't really playable due to interface lag, even though blinding framerates aren't necessary for turn-based strategies. I'd like to use Civ3, but it can't run at anything but 1024x768 (netbook screens are 1024x600).

Maybe I'll just wait a year, see how the x200 series tables handle Civ5, and upgrade instead.

My netbook (Acer EEPC 1000) will let you render at 1024x768, and "scoll" with the mouse cursor. I know this with Windows, and I think it works under Linux too, but I haven't tested (because I prefer to shrink stuff and use the native resolution without scrolling).

Yours might do this as well - do you have all the drivers/utilities installed? (I'm assuming you do what most do and wipe it on purchase, and do it yourself to avoid crudware etc)

I know about the scrolling thing, but I have the Lenovo S10-3t, which is a tablet, which basically means I'd need to use an external mouse to control the game if you have to rely on proximity to screen edge to scroll the display.

Good God, yes. Civ IV gets the fans on my gaming laptop spinning faster and more frequently than Left4Dead2. That's just not right. Oddly enough the CPU stays frosty, which I suppose does explain predictable AI but shiny graphics.

How can this make a headline/slashvertisement on Slashdot? That sounds like they're doing the right thing and giving the gamers a better gaming experience by not just ditching all of the hard work from previous games. I'm sure there must be some flaw or lie somewhere - it's just not the corporate thing to do!

Reliable rumours say that civ5 will use a super close view where most of the screen is filled with face of the selected unit. This enables the player to fully see the facial expressions and and have richer gaming experience. Of course You can take a bigger view, but then you will see only clouds.

And the "Large World" consists of 20 hexagons.

To give all the equal opportunity to fight in wars, all unit are of same power. The Phalangs will successfully defend against Warships. This is good, because it would be sad if rich people would win all the wars.

Civ 5 should be (Civ 4 + Beyond the Sword expansion pack + Giant Earth mod + 50 Civ mod). Pluss a lot more political tools like cross-civ organizations (UN, WTO etc) and unions (US, EU etc), sanctions, occupation, puppet leaders. Also in warfare there should be a tactical screen for coordinating units from different allied civs. It also wouldn't hurt if Firaxis teamed up with Monte Cristo and combined Civ and Cities XL into one epic world simulation.

See here [civfanatics.com] for more details on the above mentioned mods.

Its not exactly the same, but I remember enjoying SimCopter a lot because I could take SimCity 2000 maps and load them up in SimCopter and fly around them in 3D. The nostalgia feeling of loading my best cities and being able to play in them was fantastic. I could see people not wanting to lose their custom maps in Civ4, and this is an excellent solution.

I loved loading up a SC2000 map with the army base and stealing the army chopper. This was the closest thing you could get to 3D GTA at the time.

You might give Civ 4 a try if you haven't already -- I loved the hell out of AC and Civ 4 is the first game in the series to hold my attention the same way. Even if I can't commit atrocities against my own people.

That being said, I too would deperately like to see AC2, but I gather the intellectual property rights for it are all tangled up in an ugly way. The AC user interface has not aged well but overall that was such a great game. I think the biggest thing for me is how differently you needed to play

...turned off? That is, does anyone know if tactical combat will be made a feature that can be disabled through options? I'm really not very much into tactical combat (that's why I like games such as Civ). I'm really happy about the hex map, this has been my dream for years.

What do you mean exactly? You don't like the way you have to decide which unit attacks out of a stack? If that's the case then you can change certain options to resolve stack combat automatically. You select your unit stack, tell them what tile to attack and it automatically attacks with the best possible unit, again and again until either your stack or the enemy stack is gone.

Civ 4 makes me wait a couple seconds for my next move after I hit enter. I'd like to see multiprocessor support and 64 bit support. I hate to wait!

When I played The Operational Art of War (maybe the greatest game ever), I got a new computer and it turbo-ripped through scenarios that the old one was slow on. Civ 4 seems to proceed at its leisurely pace no matter what the computer.

I belive Larry Niven wrote that into one of his Dream Park novles, that the serach program on the computer had been programed with a dealy, as if a human got a responce too quickly they assumed it hadnet worked propperly and hit serch agine..

I have to think the point is the scenarios and mods... there's a LOT of that out there for Civ 4. They obviously hope that people will create that much stuff new for Civ 5, but it's not a bad selling point if they can say: "There's already more player-created content for this game than you'll live long enough to experience."

That being said, I can't think of a lot of good ones that wouldn't be very heavily broken by other announced Civ 5 changes. For example, removing religion.

Sorry, but Slashdotters absolutely hate any form of DRM, even when it's completely non-intrusive, unnoticeable, and doesn't interfere whatsoever with your ability to make personal backups of the game. Basically, Steam addresses every single complaint they've ever made about DRM, but they still don't like it because a lot of them want to pirate the game.

In fact I have personally spent several evenings unable to play Steam games for exactly the reasons I stated. It is a fact that Steam's DRM works this way. If you haven't encountered it, then either they don't apply it consistently or you are merely lucky.

I'll bet almost anything that you are at fault. Did you mess with the configuration, for example, to not save logon information... because of your DRM paranoia? Yeah, that would break offline mode. DUH.

You cannot always download steam games offline. When steam servers are down, or when you have no internet connection, Steam will start in offline mode. Your games remain playable, provided that you have already downloaded and run them in that case. Steam's DRM is another case where loud-mouthed forum trolls understand even less than paying customers.

There you go. While there are some circumstances in which being 'offline' will cause troubles, most games play just fine i

Flat-out wrong, at least on my computer, and I know on many others' too. I have NO idea why this happens for some and not others, but poke around the Steam forums and you'll find that this is absolutely not an isolated occurance:

When I start up my computer and discover that my wireless is down, Steam prompts me for a username and password. I can't manually run most (not all) of my games, either, because Steam is not really running from the login prompt. If I try to log in, it says it can't reach the s

Uh, yeah. They're not lies. Either that or I hallucinate wildly every time I start up my laptop and there's no wireless around. If I last shut down Steam in online mode, and there's no connection when I start it back up, it WILL NOT let me go into offline mode. I've had long conversations with Steam tech support about this, and I'm certainly no isolated case on their forums.

I find this very interesting. I have the exact same experience as parent, but clearly a lot of other responders don't. Maybe we have some kind of bug? Perhaps when Steam sees a failed connection attempt, it disqualifies you from entering offline mode...and other peoples' Steam don't try to autoconnect without a connection, while ours do?

In any case, parent is spot-on and absolutely correct for his and my own experience. I'm very happy that the rest of you have a different experience, but you might wa

Why was this comment modded "Flamebait"? The post is NOT flamebait, in addition to being right on the money: it is true, you can NOT *always* play Steam games without internet connection. And yes, like every other DRM, in this case, too, pirates will have the better experience.

I understand and believe that many people have never had problems getting Steam games to run offline. Most of my friends who game on Steam are in this boat.

It's also true that, for whatever reason of vagaries of system specs or environment, this is not true for everyone. I am in this boat. (Sometimes, Steam also seemingly-randomly refuses to authorize some of my games even with an internet connection. This isn't every time or even most of the time, but it's enough to piss you off.)